28. Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War: For Whom The Bell Tolls

How did the Spanish Civil War inspire one of Ernest Hemingway’s greatest novels? Why was Hemingway so captivated by Spain? And, were the characters of For Whom The Bell Tolls inspired by real people? Join Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett as they delve into the context behind Hemingway's writing, and the world of For Whom The Bell Tolls. Exclusions apply. Learn more at https://www.klarna.com/uk/buyer-protection-description/. For analysis, book recommendations and more, sign up to our newsletter, Book Club Notes, introduced weekly by Tabby or Dominic. Sign up at: https://www.thebookclubhq.com/ Instagram: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠@thebookclubpodhq⁠⁠ X: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠@TheBookClubPodHQ⁠⁠ Email us: ⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Assistant Producer: Alfie Norris Social Producer: Harry Balden Video Editor: Lorcan Moullier Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 2:19Speaker 01

  What are you looking at?

• 2:21Speaker 00

  One brother, the one with the scar, asked. The, Robert Jordan said.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  Do you see anything rare?

• 2:28Speaker 00

  No, said Robert Jordan. Have a cigarette?

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Why not? These are like the other hat. He of the train. This is what we should do now, Pablo said. Another train.

• 2:42Speaker 00

  We can do that, Robert Jordan said. After the bridge. When he said the word, "bridge," everyone was quiet. "After the bridge," he said again deliberately and took a sip of the absinthe.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  I do not go for the bridge, Pablo said, looking down at the table. Neither me nor my people.

• 3:02Speaker 00

  Robert Jordan now looked past the table to where the wife of Pablo was standing by the fire. Then we will do the bridge without thy aid, Robert Jordan said to Pablo.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  No, Pablo said, and Robert Jordan watched his face sweat. Thou wilt blow no bridge here.

• 3:20Speaker 00

  No.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  Thou wilt blow no bridge, Pablo said heavily.

• 3:26Speaker 00

  And thou? Robert Jordan spoke to the wife of Pablo, who was standing still and huge by the fire. She turned toward them and said.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  I am for the bridge.

• 3:36Speaker 00

  Her face was lit by the fire and it was flushed and it shone warm and dark and handsome now in the firelight as it was meant to be.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  What do you say?

• 3:45Speaker 00

  Pablo said to her, and Robert Jordan saw the betrayed look on his face and the sweat on his forehead as he turned his head.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  I am for the bridge and against thee, the wife of Pablo said. Nothing more. So hello, everybody. As of course, I'm sure everyone can tell from my superb Spanish accent there. That was from For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, named after a phrase from John Donne's piece Meditation 17. And it is a detailed and very moving, I think, portrait of war published in 1940. And it's set during specifically the Spanish Civil War, which Hemingway experienced firsthand as a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Association. And it follows Robert Jordan, played there by Dominic.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  And he is an American volunteer who is given a suicidal mission to blow up a bridge with an anti-fascist guerrilla war band. So hence the opening read. And it's definitely one of the landmark novels of the 20th century. So it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and it's had a great impact further afield. It's particularly famous for the way that it portrays guerrilla warfare. So we've got a fascinating historical context and the author, Hemingway himself, is very interesting and very, very famous. So we'll be digging into both. Now, I first read it when I was at university and my brother Luke recommended it to me because he loved it and he was doing the Spanish Civil War at the time. And I knew nothing about the Spanish Civil War and I'd never read Hemingway.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  So I was pretty skeptical and it totally took me by surprise. I loved it and I've been trying to do it on this show ever since we started. But I know you, Dominic, you're very familiar with the context and I'm sure Hemingway himself, but you've never read it. You've never read any Hemingway.

• 5:34Speaker 00

  I'd literally never read a word of Hemingway. From when we were first working together, Tabby, you were always going on about Ernest Hemingway and how much you loved him and how much I should read him. And I was always a tiny bit resistant, to be honest. I think partly because I feared there would be an awful lot of conversations about bridges. And that is precisely.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:49Speaker 00

  That's precisely what transpired, even when we were doing that conversation, which by the way, a glimpse behind the curtain for the listeners, took multiple takes.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  It's because you were being unprofessional. You kept corpse-ing. I was in the mode, I was doing my full Javier Bardem, but you.

• 6:04Speaker 00

  I mean, if people were ever able to hear the outtakes of Tabby's variety of Spanish accents, which went all the way from kind of Moscow to Istanbul and back, but never anywhere near Spain.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  That was actually intentional. It's indicative of the various political leanings of.

• 6:19Speaker 00

  Sure, very good.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  Those characters, yeah.

• 6:22Speaker 00

  The Spanish Civil War, I've always been fascinated by. One of the remarkable things about the Spanish Civil War is that it had this galvanizing effect on a generation of writers, artists, intellectuals, you know, George Orwell, obviously. And Hemingway's book, For Whom the Bell Tolls, is probably with Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. It is one of the literary sort of engagements with the war in Spain. And actually, I enjoyed reading the book, but I suspect this is one of those where I enjoy the episode more than the book. So you love it. I was a bit skeptical approaching it. I won't tell you, the listeners, what I thought until the end, have a little bit of suspense. But first, shall I give people a sense of the story for people who haven't read it?

• 7:04Speaker 01

  I think you should.

• 7:05Speaker 00

  Robert Jordan is, he's American. He loves Spain. He talks Spanish. He has volunteered for the Republican cause, that is, the left-wing anti-fascist cause in the Spanish Civil War. We're in 1937. We are in the second year of the war, basically the second full year of the war. He is in the Guadarrama, which is this sort of forested mountain range between Madrid and Segovia, sort of central to northern Spain. So basically the campaign, the nationalists, the Franco, the fascists are very keen to capture Madrid and the Republicans are trying to push them back. And so the campaign is taking place in these mountains. And Robert Jordan is an expert at blowing things up.

• 7:45Speaker 00

  So he's been doing a lot of train work, hence mention of the train from Tabby in the opening reading.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  I do not care for the train.

• 7:54Speaker 00

  Exactly. Because here's the thing, he's now got to blow up a bridge.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  There's all sorts of exciting reasons why he has to blow this bridge up. The whole book takes place over four days. So it's basically them chatting about when they're going to blow this bridge up. I have to say, I, because I was completely unfamiliar with the book, they'd been in this cave for about 100 pages and I thought, surely they're going to get out of this cave soon. Then the next time I picked up the book, I idly flicked forward and I like glanced and I was like, page 402. They went back into the cave. I was like, what? They're still in the cave? Are you joking?

• 8:25Speaker 01

  But they're plunging such emotional depths that the physical environment matters not at all. You just don't get it.

• 8:31Speaker 00

  So they're hanging around in this cave and it's basically Robert Jordan. There's various characters. Your favorite character is Tabby. You love this bloke, Anselmo. You love a mystical sage written by an American writer.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  I do.

• 8:43Speaker 00

  Lee in East of Eden. I got a lot of grief for slagging him off. You love him.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  No, no, I wasn't, I wasn't wild about Lee. I do like Anselmo, but my favorite is Pilar. And we will get to why in due course.

• 8:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. So Pilar is, she was described in that opening reading as standing still and huge by the fire. So her defining characteristics are she's very ugly, she's massive, but she's very sensual.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:06Speaker 00

  And she's earthy and full of, and sort of native wisdom, isn't she, Pilar? So she's there, there's her sort of partner.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  Lover, yeah.

• 9:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. Pablo, Pablo is the leader of this guerrilla group, but he seems to have grown disillusioned and he doesn't want to do the bridge and all this kind of thing. So Robert Jordan has joined them. He's the dynamite expert. There's also a girl there called Maria, who has escaped from the fascists. She was very badly abused by them. Robert Jordan and Maria fall in love, so that's nice. And basically, the book builds towards an exciting conclusion. They're going to do this bridge job, but for various reasons, there's an act of sabotage. So Robert Jordan is going to have to blow up the bridge in a very intrepid and genius way that he's going to follow his orders to the very end, even if it means him losing his own life.

• 9:58Speaker 00

  So as we approach the end of the book, you know, his death has been foretold earlier in the book and we don't know whether that was just mad, superstitious nonsense or whether he is really heading towards oblivion himself. So that's the story. But obviously hanging over this book, you know, we always talk about the author's backgrounds. Hemingway, you know, of all 20th century writers, he is a contender to be the most fated, the most celebrated. He's a tourist industry. People love the details of his character and nobody loves his character more than Tabitha Syrett, because you go on and on about Ernest Hemingway.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  I mean, he's, he's so mythologized. He's one of those writers, as you say, who stands kind of outside of his work. So a lot of people wouldn't be able to name a Hemingway book, but everyone's heard of Ernest Hemingway. He hung out with a lot of famous literary types. He had an extraordinary life. And I think this is a bold claim, but I would say that of all the writers that I've researched for this show, I enjoyed doing Hemingway the most.

• 10:55Speaker 00

  So the challenge for you, Tabby.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Is to restrain myself. Yeah. Not to write a biography of Ernest Hemingway.

• 11:01Speaker 00

  You've literally got like between five and 10 minutes to tell us about Ernest Hemingway. And if, and 40, if it's 40 minutes, this is on you.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  So let's start at the beginning. So he's born on the 21st of July, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, Chicago. His family is large and affluent. He is one of six. His father Clarence is a physician. His mother Grace is a musician. An unexpected detail, she, for some reason, wanted he and his older sister to seem like twins. So I think until he was about three years old, she, he was dressed in the same clothes as his sister and his hair was kept intentionally long. So he looked like a girl. Anyway, he actually later said, and also his mother was always trying to get him to become a musician or learn music. He later said that he hated his mother.

• 11:41Speaker 00

  But isn't the whole key to Hemingway, deep down, he's actually a softie and he's just constantly pretending to be an outdoorsman?

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is the thing. And I think he often looked to quite nurturing women and he certainly had a lot of women in his life. His father was very outdoors. He always took him fishing, took him on these great trips. And I think that stayed with him the rest of his life. Nature serves as almost a comfort to him for the rest of his life. And it creeps into his writing. So he goes to school. He did very well. He's sporty, good, good grades, very handsome, a big bloke. But then he starts editing the school paper. And when he did, he tried to imitate the style of sports writers, which I think is interesting, because we're going to get on to his style in a minute. But as we said, contrary to this very, you know, determinedly macho, masculine, no nonsense, hell raiser, hard drinking vision we have

• 12:32Speaker 01

  of Hemingway, he was actually a very private person and surprisingly introverted. And then after school, he went to work for the Kansas City Star as a reporter. And this had a huge influence on the famous style, because the Star's style guide was use short sentences, use short first paragraphs, use vigorous English, be positive, not negative. And I think you can see that in his writing ever since. And that brings us nicely to his style, because he is famous for being the trailblazer of a very particular minimalist, very masculine style of writing that was very unusual to the writers that came before. And it was pretty revolutionary at the time.

• 13:12Speaker 00

  Definitely seen as revolutionary. It's a style you associate really with the 30s and 40s, I suppose, and kind of hard boiled writing.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 13:20Speaker 00

  Very spare, all extraneous detail, unless it's a chat about a bridge, all extraneous detail removed. So shorn of adjectives and adverbs and things. Robert Jordan said, this is a good gun. He picked up the gun. It was a good gun. That's basically how Ernest Hemingway writes.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  So reductive.

• 13:38Speaker 00

  Well, actually, you say it's so reductive on my part. It's, that's true. Because actually, he doesn't just write like that.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  No, he does not.

• 13:46Speaker 00

  When he's excited. So when he's writing about a sex scene or something, there's loads of very, very lush, much lusher than you would expect, and much more sensual writing, a lot of stuff with colours and a lot of stuff with, you know, the landscape and the body. Like, he really does like all that stuff. So there is a insight. The interesting thing about Hemingway, I think, is that inside this sense of real discipline and control in his prose, there is a much more romantic writer trying to get out, I always think. You've mentioned a couple of times to me when we were preparing for that tremendous reading, do it as Clint Eastwood. And the Clint Eastwood style, very laconic, taciturn, the style that you might associate with, I don't know, Raymond Chandler, or you might associate it with Cormac McCarthy or something.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  J D Salinger, who was, who he was a huge influence on. They exchanged letters.

• 14:33Speaker 00

  Hemingway is seen as the progenitor of that. And yet, this, this idea that he has is what he calls his iceberg theory. So basically, the iceberg is that I know loads of stuff about what's happening in this scene. I know loads of stuff about what the character is feeling and all that, but I'm not going to tell you all of it. What you see is just the iceberg above the surface. But you sort of sense that below that is this huge amount of stuff. And if the writer is writing truly enough, this is a quote, then the reader will have a feeling of those things as strongly as if the writer had stated them. Now, even though I've sounded a bit skeptical about Hemingway, I think that's a beautiful way of thinking.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  I could not agree more. I really passionately agree with that. Because I love a writer that doesn't patronize his reader or her reader and lets you interpret it and lets you read meaning and feeling and emotion into the gaps between what is said and what is not said. You know, he never directly articulates anything. He never says, I am afraid, or he was afraid or everything. But he conveys a great deal regardless. I mean, so much is conveyed. He's also a big fan of slang and colloquialisms and repetition. And I love that, because I think it creates this gorgeous rhythm. And it actually does imitate thought, like the merry-go-round of thought, hence the repetition. We are rarely perfectly articulate in our minds. And I think that he conveys that in his writing.

• 15:54Speaker 00

  Speak for yourself, Tabby.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  I knew you were going to say that.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  Of course you did.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  You have to think things three times over before you feel safe enough to say it. But that also makes Hemingway very much marmite to people, I think. Some people don't like the fact that so much is hidden, that it's so sparse and simple, that, you know, it's the bare minimum, and that perhaps some of the characters are emotionally restrained. I disagree. I love it. I think I'm actually really moved by it. I'm moved by like a restrained, held back, masculine character, be that a woman or a man, so full of feeling when it comes out. He says at one point, it's something like, she smiled and he wondered how far the smile went. And I just know exactly what he means. I know exactly what that means. So I'm a big fan.

• 16:38Speaker 00

  After all these episodes, I know now exactly what kind of characters and what kind of writing appeals to you. You like strong men, strong taciturn men, wrestling with their feelings.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  No, I don't.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  You do. But beneath the surface, so we don't know they're doing that.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Okay. So how did he develop it? So it's probably partially born of the fact that he started as a journalist and that he wrote short stories. So Carlos Baker said, he learnt to get the most from the least. But he is also of the same generation as of other experimental modernists, so James Joyce, T S Eliot, Virginia Woolf. And I think the First World War had a lot to do with this. It caused this rupture that meant the generation that followed lost faith in the central institutions that had come before. So as Thomas Putman writes, they had to find new ways to describe the world. And Hemingway, one of his most famous kind of catchphrases is Baroque is dead. So i.e. the elaborate prose of the 19th century, they don't fit anymore. They don't fit the world that now exists. And because of that,

• 17:38Speaker 01

  he has come to be seen, which I actually find very interesting, because I often don't associate Hemingway with that generation. For some reason, he feels much more modern. Anyway, he has come to be seen as a bit of a spokesperson for that generation, the First World War generation. And he himself had very traumatic war experiences, like, like all of them did. So let's get on to his time during the First World War, because it had a big impact on his writing.

• 18:04Speaker 00

  Hemingway in World War One, he tried to enlist. He was rejected because his eyesight was not good enough. And so he ends up becoming an ambulance driver on the Italian front. So this is basically Austria fighting Italy.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:19Speaker 00

  And he gets in the summer of 1918. He sees terrible things. He sees a munitions factory in Italy on his way there that has been blown up. He's wounded by mortar fire. Don't forget, he's a very young man at this point. So it has a, you know, a traumatic, a defining effect on him. He has shrapnel wounds in his legs. He gets a decoration for helping very, very severely injured Italian soldiers.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  With the shrapnel in his legs.

• 18:48Speaker 00

  With it, right. And he's sent off to a military hospital to recuperate. He meets the first of many women that he basically falls for, Agnès von Karowski, who is a Red Cross.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Hemingway, that is, not you.

• 19:01Speaker 00

  Who's this, me or Hemingway?

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Hemingway.

• 19:03Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Not you.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  I was like, wow, where did that come from? He falls in love with her, he hopes she'll follow him to the end of the earth, but she doesn't. She's very sad, oh dear, she's engaged to somebody else. And basically, don't some biographers say of this, because this nurse left him and broke his heart, he determines this will never happen again, and so he will always leave the other women before, he will never give a woman a chance to dump him first.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess it shook his romantic idealism, so he was afraid of being abandoned the same way. So then he goes back, you know, the war is over, but he finds it very hard to adjust to normal life, as you would, I mean, he's still very young, he's 20 years old. So then in 1920, he gets a job as a freelancer and staff writer for the Toronto Star Weekly. Moves to Chicago, he's still writing for them and for another paper, but it is in Chicago that he meets his first wife, this is Hadley Richardson, she's eight years older than him, and he actually apparently said that from the moment he met her, he knew that she would be his wife. She had kind of beautiful red hair.

• 20:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, not the last time he would say those words, Tabby.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's very true. So they get married in September 1921, they move to Paris two months later, and he falls in love with Europe and the life there. He goes down an absolute storm with the literary set there. So this is also the year of his first trip to Spain, and this would be a love affair that would endure for the rest of his life until his death. He's captivated by it, he loves particularly bullfighting. He said he was fascinated by the kind of the grapple, the spectacle of life and death that he's, he found everywhere in Spain.

• 20:42Speaker 00

  We'll come on to Spain later on, but this is obviously, this is a period when people, as you say, they fall in love with Spain, they create a romantic image of it.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 20:50Speaker 00

  It's darkness and light, it's death and life, it's the, and the bullfight.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  It's passion, yeah.

• 20:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, Picasso is right, is doing all this bull pictures at this.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 20:59Speaker 00

  Period, the bullfight has become abroad, the symbol of supposedly the Spanish, primal Spanish soul that has been lost elsewhere in industrialisation and stuff, but Spain still holds on.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  This almost medieval courage in the face of death, yeah, exactly. But it's also in Paris that he becomes very close to someone that would play a huge role in his, in his life, particularly as a writer, and that is Gertrude Stein.

• 21:22Speaker 00

  Gertrude Stein, kind of modernist writer, classic figure of the kind of interwar years. She knows everybody, she introduces him to all sorts of people like James Joyce and Ezra Pound. We mentioned already Picasso, the Fitzgeralds, Sir F. Scott Fitzgerald. You told that tremendous anecdote in our Great Gatsby episode about Hemingway being invited by F. Scott Fitzgerald to.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Phallus bants.

• 21:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, to commentate on the size of his equipment.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  The size of his appendage, yeah.

• 21:53Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  And he said, no, it's, it's middling.

• 21:57Speaker 00

  Right, but it's still a huge gesture from you, Tabby.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  High expectations.

• 22:04Speaker 00

  Anyway, he's carries on, he's writing loads of journalism, he's doing all this. What he actually wants to do though is to be a big writer. So he does short stories, he writes The Sun Also Rises, a novel which is partly inspired by the bullfighting that he's seen in Pamplona.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  That's actually where he immortalises that term that is very famous now, the lost generation, which Gertrude Stein called this, this kind of literary group that she surrounded herself with.

• 22:28Speaker 00

  Exactly, so Hemingway, he's moving on now from Hadley, like, isn't he? He, he's had an affair with a woman called Pauline Pfeiffer, and they go back to America. This is the end of the twenties.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:41Speaker 00

  They have kids, doesn't his father shoot himself around this point?

• 22:44Speaker 01

  He makes a big move after writing The Sun Also Rises, because it means that he signs up with scribblers, the publishers that would be his, and, and he becomes close to Maxwell Perkins, very famous editor, discovered Fitzgerald Woolf, yeah, so then through that, Pauline Pfeiffer comes into his life. So he splits up with Hadley, he becomes a Catholic, they move to Key West in 1928. They, they then have two children, so Patrick and Gloria, and Gloria is actually born Gregory, but she identifies as a woman most of her life, anyway, this will come back later because they had a very strange relationship. So then, yeah, as you say, in 1928, Hemingway learns that his father had shot himself. This is what happens to Robert Jordan's father in For Whom the Bell Tolls,

• 23:28Speaker 01

  and it's something that he really, really wrestles with. And it is also something that will haunt Hemingway for the rest of his life, because he and his, two of his siblings suffer from severe depression and mood swings. And it gets worse and worse throughout the course of his life, not helped probably by the heavy drinking. And you can see that he's having manic episodes from his letters, very early in his life.

• 23:54Speaker 00

  You know, Hemingway's a man of massive demons, but like a lot of writers that we've talked about in this, in the show actually, but he is still writing, you know, he's writing good stuff. He writes Farewell to Arms in 1929, he does lots of short stories, he writes a book about Africa, is that right? I didn't even notice.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, he spends a lot of time in Kenya.

• 24:13Speaker 00

  Right.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  There's actually a place that we used to go on holiday called Hemingway, because he used to.

• 24:18Speaker 00

  Really?

• 24:18Speaker 01

  He used to, yeah, drink there.

• 24:20Speaker 00

  It's brilliant to have that local knowledge.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  It is, yeah, well, when a local.

• 24:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, but then he is drawn back to Spain. And before we completely run out of time, we should give a little bit of an overview of what's been happening in Spain and why this is such a landmark conflict. So I'm not going to give a massive lecture about the Spanish Civil War, but Tabby, would you like a little bit of context? Surely you would.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  Indulge me.

• 24:45Speaker 00

  So Spain has not been involved in the First World War at all, it's been a backwater, basically. It's been really politically turbulent, there is a king, it's nominally a parliamentary system. Most of Spain is untouched by the modern world. So it feels like there's these huge estates called the latifundia, which go back to the Roman period.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  I found this extraordinary, I had no idea until I started reading up for this episode.

• 25:12Speaker 00

  Well, this is true of Spain and Portugal actually, they would have absolutely gigantic rural estates, run by landowners, almost kind of feudal system. The peasants are enthralled to the landowner and to the church and whatnot. There are parts of Spain that have industrialised, the Basque Country, the North and Catalonia, and those, but those are obviously places with separatist movements. So Spain feels very fractured, and there's lots of labour unrest, there's a big anarchist movement, there is a socialist movement, there's a communist party. In the twenties, there was a coup and a general took power called General Miguel Primo de Rivera, you know, under the king, but that didn't really work out.

• 25:54Speaker 00

  They brought back democracy at the beginning of the 1930s, but it's incredibly polarised and unstable between right and left. There are terrible strikes, so for example in the North in 1935, there are assassinations, there are kind of paramilitary movements and whatnot. The son of the previous dictator, Primo de Rivera, sets up a little fascist party called the Falange, which actually sort of gives its name really to.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:21Speaker 00

  It's then co-opted by the right, by the conservatives who win the Spanish Civil War. I mean, whether they're really fascists or whether they're just basically using the fascist label is an interesting question. Right, so it all comes to a head in 1936. There's an election at the beginning of the year, which means that a Popular Front, which is a kind of left-wing alliance of liberals, socialists, you know, sort of left-wing parties, some of the separatists, the more nationalist groups from the areas like the Basque Country or Catalonia, they come to power. And there's a lot of social unrest, because they want to push through radical changes and the right don't like that. And in July 1936, the army launches, right-wing elements within the army launch a coup.

• 27:05Speaker 00

  The reason the Spanish Civil War happens is the coup doesn't fully work. So basically, the trade unions, the big cities in Madrid, Barcelona and so on, stay loyal to the elected government. So Spain is divided between the rebels, the coup people in the army and their allies, who are often like big landowners, the Catholic Church and so on, who want to defend the status quo. They've got half the country, often kind of rural areas, more conservative and so on. But the big cities and Catalonia and so on, so Madrid, Barcelona, places like that, they stay loyal to the elected government. So on the one hand, you have what are called the nationalists. And these are the forces of the right, the army, the coup

• 27:49Speaker 00

  plotters and so on. Effectively, from day one, they have very, very strong international backing from Mussolini in Italy and then Hitler in Germany. And then on the left, you have the elected government, who are the Republicans, and they get help eventually from the Soviet Union, which is something of a poisoned chalice. And they do appeal to Britain and France for help, but they don't really get it. And they have help from foreign volunteers. And this war becomes incredibly bitter and incredibly bloody. I mean, this is always the way with civil wars, because people feel it's an existential struggle, the future of their country is at stake. They come to believe, you know, their neighbours, the people in the next town, the landowners,

• 28:34Speaker 00

  or the priests, or the anarchists, or whoever, are going to kill them and their families. So we've got to kill them first. People, in some places, there are horrendous, horrendous, sadistic massacres and things.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  I think they found something like, at the end of, maybe the start of the 21st century or something, that Spain had the highest number of mass graves after Cambodia.

• 28:55Speaker 00

  Well, I can well believe that. But it becomes this cause celebre across the world. You know, it's sort of like Ukraine and Gaza rolled into one.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  It attracts intellectuals, journalists, artists from everywhere. And they're not even all communists. A lot of them are just opposed to fascism. So like Robert Jordan in this book.

• 29:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  But then alongside the official international brigades, you've got some foreign anti-fascist volunteers, like George Orwell, who served in smaller anarchist Marxist militias. Anyway, the war rages until March 1939. And then there's a coup in the Republican zone, and it leads to the surrender of their army to Franco's forces. And this was taken very badly by a lot of leftists and intellectuals all over the world, like Albert Camus. I think he, he wrote about it. He said, it was the first time that people had learned what felt like the right cause can be defeated.

• 29:54Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  He said, explains why so many of the world overfeel the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy.

• 29:59Speaker 00

  And Hemingway is writing in the aftermath of defeat. And that's, that, that actually, there are a lot of moments in the book where they say, if we just follow our orders and we stick to our cause, we will win.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:12Speaker 00

  And for Hemingway's readers in 1940, those would have had a really bittersweet effect.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:19Speaker 00

  Those words, especially as in 1940, fascism is on the march across Europe.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  But Hemingway has been following the, the war for, from the beginning, really. And then he goes there in 1937 to cover it as a journalist. And this forms the basis, obviously, for Whom the Bell Tolls. He took with him his latest lady friend, a writer and journalist, Martha Gelhorn, who would become his third wife.

• 30:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, great war correspondent.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  Exactly. He's in Madrid when Franco's army are bombarding it. He took a particular interest in these foreign and particularly American volunteers, you know. And then he would stay, and this comes up in the book, in a, in a version of it, in the Hotel Florida in Madrid. And lots of intellectuals and artists would gather there and talk. And he wrote a play about it, his only ever play. And then, two more trips to Spain in 1938, he went to the site of the Battle of the Evro. And this is the last stand of the Republican forces. He finds, sort of tellingly, that a bridge has been destroyed, and then he has to escape across the River Evro in a boat, rowing desperately.

• 31:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  And so he came to know, obviously, many of the Americans who went to fight in Spain. Among them is a guy called Robert Hale Merriman. He's a young Californian doctoral student, and he's an international brigade volunteer. He's killed in 1938. And it's widely suspected that he was the main inspiration for Robert Jordan, the protagonist of this book. So, yeah, Robert Jordan volunteers because he, like Ernest Hemingway, has a genuine, deep love of Spain and its people, an idealized view of it, as we were saying.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  So there's two separate sorts of idealism that inspire Hemingway's book, and indeed Robert Jordan's mission. So one is the idealism of the cause, stopping fascism, fighting for, you know, they think they're fighting for a better world, a more equal world, and they think they're fighting forces that are diabolical, that are evil, that what General Franco and the military rebels, and the church, and the elderly, what they represent is kind of cruelty and oppression and so on. And that's why your Orwell's and your Hemingway's go. But also for Hemingway, it's about, and indeed for Robert Jordan, it's about Spain. It's the combination of the, the ideals and the land. And he sees Spain, doesn't he? You know, the landscape, the people, the history, the culture, as ancient and primal

• 32:40Speaker 00

  and authentic and red-blooded. And it's all about death and sex and-

• 32:45Speaker 01

  And rich and passionate.

• 32:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. All of that kind of thing. And the whole book, the, the imagery of the landscape runs through that, and the sensuality, the heat.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  It's the only time his writing becomes almost, I mean, like lyrical, almost quite romantic, is when he's describing Spain, the country.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  And that's that character, Pilar. We'll talk about her a bit more after the break. But she represents that for him because of her sensuality.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 33:11Speaker 00

  Don't you not think?

• 33:12Speaker 01

  Exactly. No, definitely. So he sees the Spanish as affectionate, proud, intensely alive. They have the potential for great loyalty, as well as great lethargy. So they're blunt and they're emotional. But he also doesn't entirely romanticise them. He says that there are saints and monsters on both sides. I mean, he's slightly in love with the violence of it all.

• 33:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  And because bullfighting particularly represents for him, he sees them as a culture with tremendous courage in the face of death. And I think that his writing style is particularly interesting in For Whom the Bell Tolls, because of the Spanish, because essentially, what he's trying to do is translate English into Spanish sounding English. So in a sense, Robert Jordan's English in the book, his thoughts, his descriptions, are being translated from Spanish. And it gives the language a very strange, unfamiliar, almost archaic feel. So for instance, he says things like, what passes with thee? Or rather than say, oh, that's strange, he says, how rare. And then he imitates the forms of you in Spanish.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  So it's thee, thou, thy. And so it almost makes, it can make the prose of the book almost unnaturally formal. But I love it.

• 34:21Speaker 00

  So go back to that reading that we did. So if people recall, when Tabby was reading in her Romanian accent.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  My Soviet accent, yeah.

• 34:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. One of the Spanish people in the reading we did says to Robert Jordan, why not? These are like the other had, he of the train. Right? Obviously, they're not speaking broken English. They're speaking in Spanish. But what Hemingway is trying to do is to find a version of English that mimics the rhythms.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:46Speaker 00

  Of Spanish. I do not go for the bridge. Neither me nor my people. Thou was blown over here. I am for the bridge. I am for the bridge and against thee. All of that kind of thing. And it is, well, there are two different schools of thought on it. One is that it's slightly insistent on itself, and it's a bit jarring. And the other, it does have a kind of power, and it does have the archaicism of it, makes it feel, I mean, Hemingway wants us to feel that this is a timeless story, as well as a contemporary one, doesn't he? That this is expressing not just the contemporary realities of the Spanish Civil War, but eternal truths about life and death and courage and suffering and so on. And so his slightly weird Tolkien-esque dialogue does do that, I think.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  But it's also a book about Spain, and he, he wants to root us firmly in Spain. So he visits Spain for the last time in November 1938. And then he writes For Whom the Bell Tolls between 1939 and July 1940. He thought initially it would be a short story, but no.

• 35:44Speaker 00

  He wrote it in Cuba, didn't he? A lot of it in Cuba.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  He wrote it in Cuba. Yeah, he wrote it in three different places. Yeah, exactly. And he said of it, it's the most important thing that I've done. And it is the place in my career as a writer where I have to write a real one. So it's published in October 1940. It's an instant hit. Half a million copies are sold in months. It reestablishes Hemingway's, at that point, slightly flailing literary reputation. Graham Greene, he said, it was a record more truthful than history in terms of its portrayal of war. And interestingly, Fidel Castro said he used For Whom the Bell Tolls as a kind of training manual for his military insurrection in the southern mountains of Cuba between December of 1956 and 1959. And I was a bit sceptical too. So I kind of looked into it. It was something to do about.

• 36:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  How to position machine guns. You know all about machine guns, Dominic, you get it.

• 36:35Speaker 00

  Totally, totally. But I also know how these things work, which is basically a load of journalists turned up and they said, you know, do you like Ernest Hemingway? And Castro's like, yeah. And they said, did you maybe use this book as a training manual? And he's basically like, yeah, okay. And I think that's kind of how that conversation went. Whereas genuinely, they're poring through Hemingway's novels when they're out there.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  No, no, no, I believe it. I believe it. I never launch a military campaign without, first of all, consulting For Whom the Bell Tolls. But

• 37:00Speaker 00

  Surely.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  In some quarters, it's this strange dialogue, and its prose absolutely panned, and it's criticised for being way too partisan. So particularly, obviously, in Spain. So it was treated with great suspicion. It wasn't allowed to be published there until 1968. And the film adaptation wasn't allowed to be shown in Spanish cinemas. So obviously because the Franco regime is still in power.

• 37:22Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Now, I think we'd better get to a break.

• 37:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  And then after the break, we will get into the book and its characters and the violence behind this whole story.

• 37:31Speaker 00

  I genuinely kind of like.

• 37:35Speaker 04

  What are you doing on the 4th of September?

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Oh, you're still free.

• 37:39Speaker 04

  Why?

• 37:40Speaker 01

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• 37:57Speaker 00

  And I'm going to be sitting down with the wonderful Anita Anand, my co-host on the Empire Pod, to talk about the history of modern Iran with the absolutely brilliant Ali Ansari.

• 38:07Speaker 04

  Dominic and I will be telling a thrilling Victorian adventure on the Friday night to kick things off. And it's not just us. Mary Beard is coming. Stanley Tucci's coming. You really couldn't ask for a better guest list, unless you were on it. If you want to join us, head to southboatcentre.co.uk for the full lineup. Buy your tickets now. See you there.

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• 40:06Speaker 00

  Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the book club. Now, before we get into the details of For Whom the Bell Tolls, a little bit of housekeeping, just a reminder to sign up for our free newsletter, Book Club Notes. So what this does, you just sign up and it will arrive completely free. Every Saturday, we have further reading about the book.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  About Hemingway, in this case.

• 40:28Speaker 00

  About Hemingway and about Spanish Civil War and stuff. There are reviews from other listeners, a bit of a chat going on, lots of warnings about future books coming up, sort of advance notice so you can get ahead of the reading. There's loads of interesting thoughts from Tabby about how to read, in case you don't know how to read. That's kind of you, Tabby.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  I need to learn first.

• 40:48Speaker 00

  So you can sign up to this at thebookclubhq.com. And even though it's actually our newsletter, I can say objectively, I think the newsletter's really good.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  Oh, it's absolutely fantastic. Yeah.

• 40:59Speaker 00

  Dare I say, it's the best-in-class goal-hanger newsletter.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  I think it's the best part of this show, to be honest. It's way better than the stuff we do on air.

• 41:06Speaker 00

  Again, Tabby speaks for herself. Right. You love Robert Jordan. He's the main character. We see almost, we don't see everything through his eyes because there are moments when other characters are telling stories and there are moments when the narrative voice leaves Robert Jordan's consciousness and we're with somebody else. But he really dominates the book and you love this bloke.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  I do. So he's a young American. He taught Spanish in America before he becomes committed to the Republican cause and he volunteers. He says at one point, "I believe in a people's right to govern themselves." And he is, which is probably why I find him so attractive and actually quite moving. He is a very Hemingway-esque protagonist and he reflects many of Hemingway's ideals. So he's Spartan, he's ironic, he's brave, he is a professional idealist, but he's stoical and he has this wonderful ironic inner dialogue. And in this book especially, he is almost existential in his utilitarianism. There's something Camus about him, I think. So he says at one point, "No man has a right to take any man's life unless it is to prevent something worse."

• 42:10Speaker 01

  But he's certainly far from one-dimensional because he has a profound emotional development over the course of the book, over the course of what actually only turns out to be four days, because the jeopardy of his situation, his reflections upon his past, give him a much deeper appreciation of life. And it means that he grows closer to his comrades in the guerrilla band far more quickly than one would normally.

• 42:35Speaker 00

  You feel that he has learned something about himself and about life.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, he has a journey.

• 42:40Speaker 00

  He's been on a journey.

• 42:41Speaker 01

  He's been on a journey.

• 42:41Speaker 00

  Now, we do, we do find out about his past through flashbacks as the book goes on, don't we? So he thinks a lot about his father and his grandfather. Grandfather fought in this American Civil War brilliantly. He loves his grandfather and he was witting about his grandfather's sword or something. And then his father, he thinks of as a bit of a dead loss because his father didn't fight in any wars. And actually, the one thing he remembers about his father, I actually find this a really touching moment. His, he went away to school and he remembers his father crying at the station as he went away. His eyes damp with emotion. Robert Jordan had been so embarrassed by all of it, by his father kissing him goodbye, that he felt suddenly so much older than his father and so sorry for him that he could hardly bear it. I thought that's really nicely observed, that that's what goes through a child's mind.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  I wondered if that was drawn, I mean, you can't sort of over psychoanalyze these things, but I did wonder if that was kind of drawn from Hemingway's own life because Robert Jordan's father commits suicide and it's something that he really battles with. He's ashamed of it because he sees it as weakness and obviously Hemingway's father also committed suicide. So at one point, for instance, Maria and Pilar are asking him, "How did your father die?" And he says, "Oh, he shot himself." And they say, "Oh, to avoid being tortured." And he says, "Yes, because he can't bring himself to admit the truth." And he's terrified that he will inherit this weakness and wonders throughout the book if he really has courage. And this is a tension that he wrestles with on over and over.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  The tension between courage and the refusal to admit to fear. So he says at one point, "Turn off the thinking now, old timer, old comrade. You're a bridge blower now, not a thinker." So he's determinedly detached and practical as a way to avoid feeling the fear of which he is ashamed. And I think that Hemingway's prose really reinforces this. The emotional discipline really works with his writing.

• 44:30Speaker 00

  The thing that Hemingway's prose is doing is Hemingway's prose, it's an exercise in controlling strong feeling through very sparse language. And Robert Jordan himself is trying to do that, isn't he? And the way that he behaves, he is a man of great, Miss Hemingway and his iceberg. Robert Jordan is a man of great emotional passion and depth, but he is laconic and he's afraid of showing it, maybe.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's very fatalistic, isn't he?

• 44:55Speaker 00

  Well, I was about to say that that runs through it, doesn't it? This sort of sense that we just have to follow our orders, we have to go to the end, no matter what the end will bring. At one point, he says to himself, doesn't he? "This bridge can be the point in which the future of the human race can turn."

• 45:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:08Speaker 00

  "As it can turn on everything that happens in this war. And you have only one thing to do and you must do it." And what that captures is simultaneously the sense of fate, that he is the prisoner of fate, but also this sense that was so common between 1936 and 39, that the Spanish Civil War was an apocalyptic existential clash between good and evil and the future of the world depended upon it.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  But it also harkens back to the title. So For Whom the Bell Tolls, which is taken from this line from John Donne, because it's basically about how all mankind is united and everything you do, you do for your fellow man reflects upon your fellow man. And the more that he commits himself to the people around him in this guerrilla warband, the more attached he grows to them, Anselmo, Pilar, Maria. It makes him increasingly emotional. The emotion starts leaking out of his stoicism and it makes him very nostalgic. And I like this because he's nostalgic about the past and then later about the future that he may never know. And he thinks about America and Spain. He's recalling both with great love and affection. And I like that because they're all confused. He feels at home in both places.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  He feels connected to this great whole, but he's a outsider in both. And I love this section, the tangled longing that comes out of it. "That must be the odor of nostalgia, the smell of the smoke from the piles of rake leaves burning in the streets in the fall of Missoula, which would you rather smell? Sweet grass the Indians used in their baskets, smoked leather? So the odor of the ground in the spring after rain, the smell of the sea as you walk through the gorse on a headland in Galatia." I like it because he feels connected to everything and everywhere.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. And he feels this deep sense of connection, doesn't he? As the book goes on. So he's only just met them when the book starts. They're sort of Spanish guerrillas. There's a distance always between him and them because he's an outsider.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  They, they speak at one point about his Spanish, you know? So obviously he's an American who knows Spanish very well. And they say, "Oh, where do you come from? Where do you sound like?" You know, so he's not entirely one of them.

• 47:04Speaker 00

  No, exactly. But, you know, again, if I was being slightly skeptical, I would say he, like Hemingway, has completely drunk the old Spain, Colade.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:13Speaker 00

  And the person who embodies this is this character called Anselmo. You mentioned him briefly. He's an old man. He's, he's that, you've seen him in a thousand films. He's old, he's craggy, he's loyal, he's strong, he's dependable, he's simple.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  He's Samwise Gamgee.

• 47:36Speaker 00

  He's like an aged, yeah, he's sort of aged Samwise Gamgee, I suppose. He doesn't like killing. He hasn't succumbed to the violence. He says, "I don't like to kill men." But he has killed. I mean, this is how the book works, but still, they'll have to kill, says Robert Jordan. "Yes." Anselmo said, "Many times." And will again, but not with pleasure and regarding it as a sin.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  Because he he's meant to embody the pure, uncorrupted principles of of the Spanish peasantry and thereby the best part of the republican cause.

• 48:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  And so it's not that he ever falls in love with the gratuitous violence of the war. He only does it as a sense of duty and a sense of necessity. The other interesting thing about Anselmo is that he is a former Catholic and he misses his faith and praying a great deal. And obviously, the cause that he fights for is very anti the Catholic Church. So it highlights the complexity of those fighting on both sides of the struggle. So for Robert Jordan amidst the violence that both sides are committing, for Robert Jordan, Anselmo is a constant reminder of why he fights.

• 48:40Speaker 00

  Well, also because Anselmo articulates a sort of merciful vision, doesn't he?

• 48:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 48:48Speaker 00

  Of of life after the war. So he says, my dream is basically we win the war, we shoot nobody, we govern justly, that all should participate in the benefits according as they have striven for them and that those who fought against us should be educated to see their error, i.e. we don't kill everybody after we after we win. And Anselmo is perhaps a contrast to some other people on the republican side who have yielded to their sort of baser instincts.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. But another one who does not and reinforces this noble vision of the republican cause and its peasantry is Pilar. So the character was nicknamed for Ernest Hemingway's second wife, Pauline, and it's also the same name as his beloved fishing boat, which, you know, he kept for the rest of his life. So she is the voice of authority. She's the moral anchor of the band. She's fierce and maternal. She's very harsh, but she's kind. She also is the voice of the shared memories of the war and the atrocities both sides commit. And I think she is a magnificent character. She's so visceral. She's such a physical character. So she's described as ugly and huge, but she's very sensual and womanly.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  She's constantly describing past interactions with lovers by the beach or whatever it may be.

• 49:58Speaker 00

  She is.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  And she's genuinely devoted to the republic, but her eyes are open to its many failings and flaws. And her belief in the communal good personifies kind of the ethical core of For Whom the Belt Holds. I believe in thee and in this cause, but a man must not place his life above the lives of others. She's kind of responsible for the group. She cooks for them. She admonishes them. She looks after them all. But she's also become the de facto leader of the group because her husband, partner, lover, Pablo, the purported leader, has lost his mojo. He is disenchanted. He doesn't believe in it anymore. But he used to be barbarous. He has committed many, many, many bloody crimes over the course of the war.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  He went from being a fierce revolutionary leader to being disenchanted, afraid, cynical, bitter.

• 50:50Speaker 00

  Well, somebody said of him, didn't they? They say at the start of the movement, Pablo killed more people than typhoid fever. It's a very nicely observed portrait, this. He is suffering from basically PTSD.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:02Speaker 00

  And he is full of regret for all that he has seen and done. He says at one point, I'm sorry for the people I've killed. I will bring them all back, everyone, even the basically even the fascists that I killed.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  It's so nuanced because you're kind of led to believe that he's the villain of the book in so far as there is one. But it's Hemingway, so there is no such thing as kind of black and white, good and bad morality. And he totally personifies that. He's just afraid. He's afraid of death.

• 51:28Speaker 00

  He's afraid of death, but also he doesn't want people to die unnecessarily. He thinks, I mean, this is the thing with Pablo. Pablo was set up for us as sort of the antagonist. You're absolutely right. From the beginning, we're led to believe that he will betray them. That's made explicit really in the first 50 to 60 pages of the book. Characters kind of say to Robert Jordan, hey, this bloke's clearly going to betray, you know, he's a complete loose cannon. And actually Pablo will make decisions that undermine their cause. But as we discover, he's not making them because he's just a sort of, you know, generic traitor. He actually is making decisions because he cares more about keeping them alive than they care themselves.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:11Speaker 00

  You know, he has not yielded to this thing about like, you know, fate, you just do, you follow your orders, you go to the end. He's riddled with doubt.

• 52:20Speaker 01

  He is.

• 52:20Speaker 00

  Self doubt about their cause, self doubt about what he's done in the war, all of that kind of thing. So he's a more nuanced character than you would expect if you're a third of the way through the book, I guess.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  Definitely. But this nuance, I think it brings us to the politics of the book because obviously Pablo goes from being an ardent republican to losing faith in everything bar humanity, I suppose. And I think this nuance, the politics of the book, it reflects Hemingway's politics because he's relatively indulgent towards the communists. I would say that he probably takes their side.

• 52:55Speaker 00

  He does. Robert Jordan, he accepted their discipline for the duration of the war, we're told, because in the conduct of the war, they were the only party whose programme and whose discipline he could respect. And so the portrait, I mean, this is such a contentious issue in the Spanish history, the Spanish Civil War, where the left undone by their own side because the communists were basically, the Stalinists were basically too busy purging people to actually get on with the job of, yeah, of fighting fascism. And historians massively argue about this. Hemingway does seem to be leaning on the more pro-communist side, doesn't he?

• 53:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. But also his publishers, they urged him to tone down the Marxism, Robert Jordan's Marxism. So in this, you get the sense that he is a Marxist, a communist, whatever it may be, in so far as it serves Spain, but not external to Spain.

• 53:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's fair. And it's not a simplistic portrait because there are times when he says, for example, there's a scene set in Madrid, in the hotels where they're all congregating, the international people. And Hemingway's characters reflect on the lies that the republicans or the communists in particular are telling about their own revolution and their own campaign. In a revolution, you could not admit to outsiders who helped you, nor that anyone knew more than he was supposed to know. He had learned that. If a thing was right fundamentally, the lying was not supposed to matter. There was a lot of lying, though. Now, what's so interesting about this is we did a book earlier in the show, 1984 by George Orwell.

• 54:26Speaker 00

  Orwell, served in Spain, was completely transformed by his experience in Spain. It was Spain that made him an anti-communist and anti-Stalinist because Orwell said, the communist stuff is full of deceit and lies and treachery, and I will not accept it. Sometimes you just have to stand up for the truth and all of this. Hemingway, well, at least his characters, and I think Hemingway himself actually, do not follow Orwell down that road. They say the communists are the only serious people here. Yeah, they're lying and whatnot, but you just have to follow them. At one point, a character reflects on Orwell's own group, the Poom, as they were called, this militia, and they described them as a heresy of crackpots and wild men and infantilism.

• 55:09Speaker 00

  There were some honest misguided people, but basically they're useless. Now Orwell, if he had read that, would have been driven absolutely mad because he would have said, you have fallen for Stalin's propaganda. You know, it's people like us who were trying to do the right thing because the communists turned on these militias and basically violently repressed them. And so that argument between Hemingway and Orwell, I mean, these are the two most famous books, fictional books about the Spanish Civil War in English. And they would have absolutely, even though they're supposed to be on the same side, they would have hated each other.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  But I think in Hemingway's defence, I think he's also keen to point out the inconsistencies in the politics of the communist side as well. Like some scholars, like this guy called Ben Stolffus, he argues that the book is just as critical of the communist party and actively rejects the ideology because no one's politics are pure and politics is rarely linked to idealism. So at one point, Franco is called a bad fascist. At another point, a member of the republican guerrilla band that they're all with, Augustine, says, they say the government moves further to the right each day, that in the republic they no longer say comrade but senor and senora. Are we to win this war and lose the revolution? And it's a fascinating tension at the heart of the Spanish Civil War because the republican camp is made up of so many different groups, socialist liberals, communists.

• 56:26Speaker 01

  So winning the war doesn't necessarily equate to any sort of social revolution, landis redistribution, the destruction of ancient hierarchies, anything like that. It's different degrees of idealism in many of the characters. So Robert Jordan says of himself, you've always been a bad Marxist. And when asked at one point if he is a communist, he says, no, I am anti-fascist. And that's an important political distinction in the book. He's not motivated by political tribalism, rather Spain. He's devoted to Spain. He fought in this war because it started in a country that he loved and he believed in the republic. I wouldn't say that's Marxist.

• 56:59Speaker 00

  Exactly. I don't think it is a Marxist book. I think you could argue that Robert Jordan and indeed his creator are perhaps more indulgent on the communists than some writers would be. But I agree with you. I have to say, it does not feel like it's a politically preachy book particularly. And actually, for me, this, I mean, this maybe brings us to the bit of the book that I think I will remember the most.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  I hadn't read For Whom the Belt Holds for a long time. And this bit and another bit were really what's stuck in my mind.

• 57:27Speaker 00

  So the most horrendous atrocities in the book, interestingly, are committed by the republicans.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:34Speaker 00

  I mean, there are atrocities, of course, committed by the nationalists, including the rape of the love interest, Maria. But the one that is the most visceral, though described in the greatest detail, one of the most celebrated scenes that Hemingway ever wrote is a scene that is being recalled by this character, Pilar, who you love, who is the embodiment of earthy womanhood in the republican cause.

• 57:57Speaker 01

  Exactly. But she is voicing the moral ambiguity at the heart of the war. I mean, Ernest Hemingway, he's so famous for his war coverage, but he considered war to be a crime against humanity, you know, no matter what you believe in. So at one point, Pilar describes how Pablo orders the mass slaughter of fascists, many civilians included, after winning back their village. It starts as sort of a collective punishment of people that are apparently guilty, they have it coming, the victors believe it to be necessary. But as it continues and the republicans get drunker and drunker on wine and bloodlust, it just becomes this melee of gratuitous death.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  So she says, it was like a carnival, but it was a carnival of death. And I actually was reminded so forcibly when I read that of the French Revolution. You know, when you hear about how drunk all the revolutionaries were and how it just escalated. And there are these just appalling, hideous scenes told in this sort of unsparing, matter of fact, way that are just, it really, it really hits home.

• 59:04Speaker 00

  It does. And it reminded me a lot of, there's a brilliant history, for people who are interested in the history of the Spanish Civil War, or the Spanish Holocaust, by the great historian of this war, Paul Preston. And I remember reading it about 15 years ago, and it always has stuck in my mind. Because it's basically, he was like, let's just get straight to it. Let's get really deep into the violence of the Spanish Civil War, stare it in the face, atrocities carried out in villages by people who had lived alongside each other for maybe 40 years. And now they're settling debts and, you know, all of that.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  Because of the foreign brigade thing, I think it's quite an idealized war as well. So it's good, it's good to get into this stuff.

• 59:42Speaker 00

  So here you have a village, Pilar is recalling it, as you say, Tabby, it's a village that's just been recaptured. They all know each other. All the people who are being massacred are people who were not, it's not a big place, right? They're known to everybody in the village, and they decide to kill them. And a lot of them are, they're the mayor, they're the bloke who ran a shop, they're a gla who was a landlord. Some of them are fascists, or very right wing. Some of them just happen to be rich. Some of them just happen to have been on the other side because, for family reasons, or, or they were just, this bloke ran a shop, everyone owes him money, let's kill him.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  There's one guy who's just a Catholic. He's a sweet old man who goes to his death very bravely. Because what happens is, they have to run a gauntlet, and as they do it, they're being beaten by clubs and flails, and basically their head, and then they're pushed off a cliff. This old man, he's a Catholic, purely because his wife was Catholic, and he loved his wife. And his wife watches him go to his death, and calls out to him, and he's crying, but he continues and faces his death bravely.

• 1:00:44Speaker 00

  I mean, we don't need to sort of read all the quotes and stuff. But I mean, it's really, it's described in this very apparently simple, colloquial, really, matter of fact prose, which makes it so much more powerful. Don Gillemo did this, Don Gillemo did that. Then they took Don Bonito, they dragged him by the shirt, they did this. And it just becomes, it's hypnotic writing, you can't look away, but it's horrible. And then she describes how the people who, basically people stopped coming out of the town hall, they'd been held in the town hall, made to run the school unit, they don't want to come out anymore because, you know, they're going to be killed. So the mob basically invades the town hall to kill them. And she describes people, I mean, they're killing them with pitchforks, and with the flails they use, you know, the stuff they use for threshing

• 1:01:26Speaker 00

  and things. And the priest is there, and they're chopping at him, they're chopping into his back with the sickles and things. It's really, it is, it is absolutely horrific. And it stays with you. I mean, that's probably actually one of the things that I'll remember most in the book. And I guess, again, that is to Hemingway's great credit.

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:48Speaker 00

  That the simplistic thing to do would have been to make this an atrocity story committed by the nationalists against the Republicans.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:01:55Speaker 00

  He turns that round.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:57Speaker 00

  And he makes it the good guys who are carrying out this horrible thing.

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  I think it's very much to his credit. The fascists don't get let off either, to be fair. Pilar says that the horrors of this day are matched only by what follows when the fascists take the town back later. And obviously, there's the appalling mistreatment of Maria. So she's raped, she has her head shaved, her family is shot against a wall. And she describes it all in bed with Robert Jordan, and her voice is dead and flat. And she says, there were things done to me. I fought until I could not see, I fought until, until. So the word rape is never actually used in a very Hemingway-like way. But we know exactly what he means. We know exactly what is done to her.

• 1:02:37Speaker 00

  His portrait of Maria, who is this very wounded character, maybe we'll come on to her in a second. My one question with her is whether, some people might read that and say, a character who's a victim of rape in war, and then she's sort of redeemed by the love of a good man who sleeps with her and it's all fine. I would be a tiny bit anxious about that, or uneasy about it.

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  I don't think we're meant to see that as her redemption. I think we're meant to see it as almost his redemption. He finds new meaning through her. She is naive, damaged, hurt. Suppose she's just looking for a sliver of life and comfort.

• 1:03:14Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  But she, you know, as we will discover, you know, her life goes on after the book. We don't know what becomes of her. I think she's not a brilliant character, because she is, you know, she does suffer, she feels pain, physical pain, but she has a sense of humour, and she's brave, and she continues. So this is basically, I think, really at the heart of the book, it's about the corrupting force of violence in war, how it can deprive anyone of their humanity, but how it can also deprive anyone, even the bravest of men, of their courage, like Pablo. And then there's another story that I know you really liked that Pilar tells about a bullfighter.

• 1:03:48Speaker 00

  This is Hemingway bingo now.

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  This is Hemingway bingo.

• 1:03:51Speaker 00

  Come on, we haven't only bullfighting.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  He's a bullfighter, and he was my lover.

• 1:03:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. But he became afraid of the bull.

• 1:03:58Speaker 00

  That's exactly.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  He looked into the bull's eyes, and he said, I am afraid of you, bull.

• 1:04:06Speaker 00

  Tabby, you should actually get a job. Forget the podcasting, as a Hemingway prose impersonator.

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  I should, I should, I should.

• 1:04:13Speaker 00

  She's remembering, they have a big banquet for this bloke, Finito, who's a trampian bullfighter. And they bring the bull's head out, and Finito cracks, and he sinks into his chair, and he just says quietly, no, no. And then you see blood coming out of the bull. And he says, I mean, this is again, the slightly sort of pigeon Spanish, all season, yes, to make money, yes, to eat, yes, but I can't eat. Hear me, my stomach is bad. But when the season finished, no, no, no. And he's just staring at this bull's head, and the bull's head staring back at him. But basically, this is about how you lose your, a man, this is so Hemingway, a man can lose his virility, his self-belief,

• 1:04:55Speaker 00

  his courage, because he can be the bravest man in the world. But there's a point when he cracks, and there's too much violence, and there's too much killing. And this happened to this matador called ironically Finito, and it's happened to her, bloke Pablo. And I guess Robert Jordan, part of the discipline of the prose, the discipline of his approach is that they've all got the seeds of this in them, and he's trying to keep it at bay himself, because he's fighting his own fear, isn't he?

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  There is another, actually, I think, very touching element of this recollection that Pilar has. Because I think you feel forcibly how much she loved this man, this man that was later broken, the tenderness of that. And it's a necessary contrast to the harshness, the starkness of so much of the book. And another element of that, another, you know, gentle reprieve, is the relationship between Maria and Robert Jordan. As I've said, I find Maria to be a very endearing character. She's almost naive, she has a light spirit in spite of her suffering. And it's really interesting, because when they are together, particularly when their lovemaking is described, it's the only time that Hemingway

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  really indulges in nature writing. You know, it's much more descriptive, the prose suddenly becomes malleable. It's beautiful, actually. And the first description we have of her is very tender and gentle, and, and as I say, descriptive, high cheekbones, merry eyes, a straight mouth with full lips, golden hair, brown of a grainfield that has been burnt dark in the sun. So that's quite unusual for Hemingway.

• 1:06:26Speaker 00

  It is unusual, and it stands out compared with the descriptions of the others. Again, if you were being sceptical, you would say, isn't it interesting that Hemingway really, he fires up the engines when the sexy love interest enters the story. However, maybe I'm being too harsh.

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  I think you are, because I think he uses that same, much, much more romantic writing, when he's describing Pilar's encounter of the past as well. In a world that is harsh, when you're fighting a war, and there is jeopardy everywhere, you would feel particularly tender to whom you feel tender, you know what I mean? Like, it wouldn't be masculine and macho. And Robert Jordan really does fall in love with Maria, because it turns into a very sweet romance. But it is intensified by the sense of approaching death that hangs over everything. So in the night, he woke and held her tight, as though she were all of life and being taken from him. She brings new meaning into his life, and she belies

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  his utilitarianism. And the more he begins to feel for her, he begins mourning the time that he will not have, which he didn't do before, he didn't indulge in that before. So he says, you have it now, and that is all your life is now. There is nothing else but now. And there's this journalist, Jeremy Bowen, who writes about For Whom the Bell Holds, and he says, Hemingway's great achievement is in capturing the swirling, grinding intensity of the feelings that consume human beings, as they realise that the longer they stay in danger, the more likely they are to get hurt. And I couldn't agree more, because he and Maria have to create in the space of four days, an entire life. So they start calling each other husband and wife. He says to himself in his mind, why not marry her?

• 1:08:04Speaker 01

  Sure, he thought, I will marry her. Then we will be Mr. And Mrs. Robert Jordan of the Sun Valley, Idaho, or Corpus Christi, Texas, or Butte, Montana. Spanish girls make wonderful lives. And there's this terrible, I find agonising, mournful sense of the discovery of love and meaning, just as time is running out. It makes me feel like that bit in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, when she and Angel Claire have their last night together before she gets executed, essentially. I think it's very touching.

• 1:08:33Speaker 00

  You found this really moving, didn't you? The relationship between Robert Jordan and Maria.

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  I do. I'm wiping away tears as I describe it.

• 1:08:40Speaker 00

  Usually so cynical, and this is that, and now people see the different side of you. Amazing.

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  The magic of Hemingway.

• 1:08:46Speaker 00

  Well, yeah.

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  You're going to be all sceptical and all British about it.

• 1:08:53Speaker 00

  Normally, I reveal myself in this podcast to have an absolute heart of gold, to be a very soft-hearted person.

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  That's true, actually, that's true.

• 1:09:00Speaker 00

  I guess it is moving. I mean, because there's an earnestness to it. There is a real feeling that they have striven for some sort of human connection in the face of Approaching death. And I suppose this takes us back, doesn't it, to some extent, towards the meaning of the title.

• 1:09:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:16Speaker 00

  Because the title, John Donne's Meditation Seventeen, "Any man's death diminishes me because I'm involved in mankind, and therefore said not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee." Meaning, one man dies and you hear the bell ringing and you don't say, who's that for? Because every man's death is a death for you, because all human beings are connected. And meaning comes from our connections with other human beings. So Robert Jordan, who begins the narrative quite self-contained, doesn't he? He's just the dynamite guy.

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:49Speaker 00

  By the end, he's got, he's fallen in love with Maria. But in a way, he's fallen in love with all these characters. He feels we're bound together by this comradeship in the face of terrible danger.

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  So he says, you know, Anselmo, Pilar, all of them, they are brother, mother, sister, wife. I mean, it's a little bit tangled, but you know, they mean everything to him. They mean more to him than the people that he has known all of his life, because the jeopardy of their situation, that which they are bound by, their connection to each other, has made them go closer together than they would have done if they'd lived a whole life together in Montana.

• 1:10:19Speaker 00

  He's thought forward about what will happen, but we kind of know it probably never will. You know, the life they'll have when they've escaped and all of that. And at the end, he follows through, and it's his belief in mankind and his belief in comradeship that mean that even though actually blowing up this bridge, it's going to be incredibly risky, probably futile, it's probably going to kill them all. The final lines of the book, we won't spoil it too much, but basically, he is forced to take a decision that he knows could have disastrous consequences for him, doesn't he?

• 1:10:53Speaker 01

  I think you should read those final lines, because I think it's some of the loveliest writing in the whole book. And actually, I have to reveal myself here. I actually did weep the first time I read this.

• 1:11:03Speaker 00

  Robert Jordan lay behind the tree, holding on to himself very carefully and delicately to keep his hands steady. He was waiting until the officer reached the sunlit place where the first trees of the pine forest joined the green slope of the meadow. He could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  Oh, literal chills. Literal chills.

• 1:11:26Speaker 00

  Well, it starts with him and pine needles, doesn't it? And then in the forest, and it ends with him back in the forest. It is very moving, the decision that he's made. Tabby, try to hold yourself together for the final moment.

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

  I just can't, I'm gonna need to take five.

• 1:11:42Speaker 00

  So Hemingway, let's talk about Hemingway. Hemingway, he went back to America. He ended up moving to Cuba. He divorces, I mean, I've lost track where he is with his wife. He divorces Pauline. He marries Martha Gellhorn, who'd been a war correspondent with him in Spain. Then, I'm reading your notes, Tabby, you've written the words, Pearl Harbor at December 1941, Hemingway went mental. I mean.

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  He did go mental. He used his boat, Pilar. He turned her into a, like, counterintelligence, I don't know, surveillance ship. And he'd go around.

• 1:12:15Speaker 00

  To patrol for U-boats, right? Looking for U-boats.

• 1:12:18Speaker 01

  Not only that, he created a counterintelligence unit in his guesthouse to survey potential phalanges and Nazi sympathizers. And the FBI thought this was so dodgy and suspicious that they kept a file on him because they thought he was a communist.

• 1:12:34Speaker 00

  Now, at this point, he's off his face most of the time, isn't he? Because he's drinking so much.

• 1:12:37Speaker 01

  Oh, he's drunk as a skunk. Yeah. He's also very fat. He's developed diabetes. He's fighting with Martha. He is my, my male counterpart.

• 1:12:49Speaker 00

  It's your male counterpart? I thought you were saying he's your dream man.

• 1:12:54Speaker 00

  So anyway, he goes back to Europe as a war correspondent. He goes, he's a D-Day, he's on Omar Beach. He tries to set up his own resistance unit in France, gets into massive trouble.

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  Big slap on the wrist.

• 1:13:06Speaker 00

  People say like, are you meant to be writing like stories about this, not leading your own guerrilla band?

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  People are like, your whole thing is you're not meant to be interventionist. You're literally just a war correspondent.

• 1:13:15Speaker 00

  Didn't he claim that he'd personally liberated Paris? Like, he got there first and all this?

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  Yes, he did. But it was, yeah, no bueno, not true.

• 1:13:22Speaker 00

  So Martha Gellhorn bites the dust.

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  He treats her very badly. He's fallen in love with someone else, and he tries to, she says, oh, can you get me to London? Can you get me a press pass? And he's like, no, get it yourself. So she has to travel across the Atlantic in a boat with live ammunition or something, because he won't get her a press pass, won't fly her over.

• 1:13:40Speaker 00

  I think he's a poor husband, frankly. He gets really miserable because all his friends die, like Fitzgerald and all these people. And there's the whole issue with his son, initially Gregory, later his daughter Gloria. Gregory stroke Gloria is arrested in a women's bathroom, dressed in women's clothing. Hemingway does not take a 21st century view of this.

• 1:14:00Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:14:01Speaker 00

  And is very displeased.

• 1:14:02Speaker 01

  He goes full old, like, Hemingway, you know?

• 1:14:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  The macho side.

• 1:14:06Speaker 00

  But the very next day, Pauline dies, like, who was Gloria stroke Gregory's mother? So that's not good.

• 1:14:14Speaker 01

  And he blames Gloria for her death. So they have a very bad relationship.

• 1:14:19Speaker 00

  Then the 50s. I mean, it just never ends with him. He has two plane crashes, basically, what, like a few days apart?

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:25Speaker 00

  In Africa?

• 1:14:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes. Very nearly dies. But he does manage to win a Pulitzer Prize for Old Man of the Sea in 1952. Then, he had, you know, he has to leave Cuba because the Bay of Pigs is on the horizon, lots of political unrest. By this point, he is seriously, seriously ill and addled and depressed. He's on the verge of a breakdown. So he's taken to a clinic. He receives electroconvulsive therapy. After this, he returns home and he shoots himself in the head with his favorite shotgun on July 2, 1961. And actually, two of his siblings do the same thing. And it's likely that they all suffered from a hereditary condition, which results in sort of mental and physical deterioration. So I think it's

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  a really sad end to a remarkable life. But in some ways, it's foreshadowed throughout his prose. And obviously, his father committed suicide.

• 1:15:15Speaker 00

  Robert Jordan's father and all of that. Yeah, you can sort of see that this was an end, that he'd almost, in an odd way, he's kind of willed for himself, I think.

• 1:15:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:23Speaker 00

  I mean, no one loves anybody more than you love Ernest Hemingway, Tabby.

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  Hmm. I think you might be right.

• 1:15:30Speaker 00

  You think you'd have got on? I think you would, actually.

• 1:15:32Speaker 01

  I think we would have gotten on famously.

• 1:15:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. Smoking, drinking, you know, hanging out in Spain. Would have been great.

• 1:15:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. Both of you enormously fat and addled.

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  We would have had a great time.

• 1:15:48Speaker 00

  It's, there is no change from your normal life, frankly.

• 1:15:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. So let's, let's give this a rating. What are we gonna rate it out of?

• 1:15:54Speaker 00

  I think you should go first, because I think you're gonna give it a higher mark, and I don't want to influence you.

• 1:15:58Speaker 01

  I mean, you wouldn't anyway, but I'm gonna give this nine. I love, love, love Hemingway's writing. I love the characters. I love the sense of Spain. It made me want to go to Spain all my life after I read it. Gave me a real fascination with the Spanish Civil War. I find it poignant and touching. And to use a very hackneyed phrase, I think it's genuinely moving and authentic and rewarding in the extreme. But I am going to minus one point, because I don't really care about the passages when we're not with Robert Jordan. You know, when we go over to other guerrilla groups or whatever, or when we go with Anselmo.

• 1:16:32Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  Oh, God, what are you gonna do?

• 1:16:38Speaker 00

  I told you that I couldn't decide between six and seven. I told you that a few, like a week ago.

• 1:16:43Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:16:44Speaker 00

  And so I left the ball in your court. I thought, let's test Tabby's power.

• 1:16:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:49Speaker 00

  And I'm happy to say you've come up trumps, because I'm gonna go with seven. So I'm basically marking this down, because about half of the way through, I thought, Christ, there's much more of this. And they're not, they're still in this bloody cave. I do, we had this issue with Steinbeck and East of Eden.

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:03Speaker 00

  I'm not a great one for this slightly performative, oh, this is very profound mid-century American prose.

• 1:17:11Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:17:12Speaker 00

  It doesn't really speak to me. However, there is beauty in the writing, particularly when he actually, when Hemingway lets himself go, when he perhaps relaxes the discipline of their very sparse, spare sentences. And the bits when Robert Jordan is with Maria, I actually agree with you, Tabby. I was only, I was only paying devil's advocate. I do find their relationship really quite sweet. And I think it's very, very nicely written. I think, I mean, you've got to dot marks for the mad way they speak.

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  No, I like it. I like it. I find it very effective.

• 1:17:45Speaker 00

  Are you the one of the bridge? Are thee one, are thou, all that? Like, that's just too much.

• 1:17:50Speaker 01

  That's how I now talk at home.

• 1:17:52Speaker 00

  It's, I mean, it's how you want it to do.

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  Will thy pass me the milk? Are thee of the bridge?

• 1:18:00Speaker 00

  I think basically, if you've listened to the show and you haven't read the book, you can tell now whether you're gonna like this or not. There'll be some people who say, God, that sounds brilliant. Bullfighting, mad talking.

• 1:18:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:10Speaker 00

  Pine needles, you know, extreme violence. I love it. And there'll be other people like, I'll never read that book. Bring me more of The Hunger Games. Okay, so, we have our own guerrilla band of alcoholic malcontents, don't we?

• 1:18:20Speaker 01

  We do.

• 1:18:21Speaker 00

  The people who subscribe to our newsletter, Book Club Notes.

• 1:18:23Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:18:24Speaker 00

  And we want you to do that at thebookclubhq.com.

• 1:18:27Speaker 01

  We do.

• 1:18:28Speaker 00

  And Tabby, I'm sure people would like nothing better than to hear what's coming up on the show.

• 1:18:33Speaker 01

  Well, if they, if that is indeed what they want. Coming up, we have Rebecca by Daphne de Maurier, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, The Lord of the Flies by William Golding, A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Goldfinger by Ian Fleming, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, White Knights by Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Shining by Stephen King.

• 1:18:59Speaker 00

  That is a heck of a reading list.

• 1:19:00Speaker 01

  It is an incredible lineup, I have to say. I got tingles as I was reading that.

• 1:19:04Speaker 00

  All right. Thank you very much, everybody, for listening to the show. Thank you so much for all your comments that you send in, which we always enjoy reading.

• 1:19:10Speaker 01

  Thank you. We really appreciate it.

• 1:19:12Speaker 00

  And we'll be back next time with Daphne de Maurier and with Rebecca. Bye-bye.

• 1:19:16Speaker 01

  Adios.

• 1:19:26Speaker 02

  From the studio that brought you WandaVision.

• 1:19:28Speaker 03

  I was an Avenger, but I'm not a hero anymore.

• 1:19:34Speaker 02

  The Vision returns for the final chapter of the groundbreaking trilogy.

• 1:19:38Speaker 03

  That family wasn't real. You sure about that? I had a father called Vision.

• 1:19:42Speaker 02

  How is this possible?

• 1:19:45Speaker 02

  Don't miss the two-episode premiere of Marvel Television's Vision Quest.

• 1:19:49Speaker 03

  Nothing bonds a family together quite like Mortal Jeopardy.

• 1:19:53Speaker 02

  Now streaming on Yonkers Plus.

• 1:19:57Speaker 05

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